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Colorado photographer gives 1877 Hayden survey a second look

21st century pictures paired with 19th century drawings

By Christy Fantz

Staff Writer

Posted:
09/29/2016 02:57:11 PM MDT

Updated:
09/29/2016 03:44:04 PM MDT

A drawing of the Tower of Babel, left, in the Garden of the Gods, which is included in Hayden s Landscapes Revisited: The Drawings of the Great Colorado Survey, with a photograph by Thomas P. Huber, right. (University Press of Colorado / Courtesy photos)

Thomas Moran's Boulder Canyon

The famous 19th century landscape artist Thomas Moran was a member of Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden's expedition to chart the Rocky Mountains. Moran, the well-known painter of the American West, gave the United States a first view of the beautiful vistas. However, Thomas P. Huber noted that Moran "rarely met a dramatic natural scene that he did not want to 'enhance.'"

This was the case with Moran's dark, gothic-like pen-and-ink sketch of Boulder Canyon. Huber notes in Chapter I that "the walls of the canyon at this juncture are very steep in real life, but they do not approach the near vertical depicted by Moran."

Source: "Hayden's Landscapes Revisited: The Drawings of the Great Colorado Survey"

Years ago, Thomas P. Huber, now 69, stood at the 13,370-foot high Buckskin pass of the Elk Mountains in the Rocky Mountains to capture a sweeping panoramic photograph.

When wind gusts picked up to 70 miles-per-hour, Huber and his wife Carole, now 68, had to wrap their mission and hike four hours back

Maybe they'll have better luck next week, Huber thought.

Huber, a geography and environmental studies professor at University of Colorado Colorado Springs, was attempting to capture a vivid, panoramic photo to parallel the natural landscape features surveyors created with ink-drawn maps 150 years ago.

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"There were some pretty tough hikes and mountain climbing," Huber said. "Sometimes it took us three or four days or three or four attempts to find the right spot ... Many of them were way out of the way, so it's a long hike in and a long hike out to find the exact spot."

Like that blustery attempt in the central Elks.

"I couldn't take the drawing out to look at it to make sure I was in the right spot because it would've been destroyed by the wind, so I just guessed," Huber said. "And of course it wasn't the right spot, so the next week we had to do another eight-hour hike."

Thomas Moran drew this sketch of Boulder Canyon, which is included in "Hayden's Landscapes Revisited: The Drawings of the Great Colorado Survey," with photographs by Thomas P. Huber. (University Press of Colorado / Courtesy photo)

It was all worth it, though, Huber said.

His 28 photographs of 19 landmarks throughout Colorado are now documented in an open-access website for the project, "Hayden's Landscapes Revisited: The Drawings of the Great Colorado Survey," with maps by Evan Menkhus and Scott Callahan. The project was published by Boulder's University Press of Colorado and features Huber's accompanying explanation and historical context.

History revisited

In 1873, three years before Colorado was a state, geologist Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden led an expedition to chart the Rocky Mountains. The crew of topographers, map makers and painters sketched and surveyed dozens of the state's majestic landscapes.

This photograph by Thomas P. Huber shows modern-day Boulder Canyon and is included in "Hayden's Landscapes Revisited: The Drawings of the Great Colorado Survey." (University Press of Colorado / Courtesy photo)

Hayden left the state with the 1877 Geological and Geographical Atlas of Colorado, and various landmarks named after him — including the Yampa River valley town called Hayden.

Huber said that while working on the project, he found Hayden's work to be quite accurate.

"William Henry Holmes — he's the one who did the beautiful, gigantic panoramas — he was really spot-on with what was out there," said Huber. "He might have put some rocks where there weren't rocks or a tree where there wasn't a tree just to sort of frame it."

Hayden, leader of the expedition, didn't do any of the drawings himself — but he used an odometer that was accurate within about 3 percent. Famous landscape painter Thomas Moran, on the other hand, "never met a landscape he didn't want to alter," Huber said, laughing.

"In fact his most famous is the drawing and painting of Mount Holy Cross," Huber said. "His painting and drawing could not have been done from where he did it ... there's a mountain between where he supposedly drew it and where Mount Holy Cross was. He made up some of the landscape."

Huber said he wanted to get a broad representation of the drawings when he selected the 19 spots.

"When Hayden came each field season, he broke his group of survey people into segments," he said. "I wanted to do a representative section of the kinds of drawings they did. He had some drawings that were really quick sketches, some that detailed geology, and some — the most beautiful and impressive — were these gigantic panoramas of large landscapes."

Huber said that Hayden and crew didn't sketch areas like Denver, cities along the Front Range or the Great Plains, as the emphasis of the survey was to focus on the geology and geography of the land. This aspect, paired with the varying quality of the century-and-a-half-old maps, played a role in where Huber chose to photograph.

Huber strived for his own accuracy, with the help of his "research buddy" and wife, Carole, a senior instructor in his UCCS department.

"She would not let me vary by 2 feet," he said. "She'd say, 'No, Tom, come over here. You can't take that photograph, it's not the right angle, we have to find the exact spot.'"

Save for a couple photographs, with which he got permission from private landowners, Huber said the bulk of his work was snapped from public land.

Changes in Colorado

Sure, there are ski resorts, big ranches, vacation homes and gas wells that have popped up after 150 years. But Huber said that in a geology sense, not much of Colorado has changed. He noted that Colorado Springs offered the most significant variance, as an entire city blossomed right below Holmes' survey drawing.

If this project were to be recreated in 150 years, Huber said vegetation and global-warming induced erosion would cause significant transformations.

"We're seeing gigantic changes already with the pine beetle infestation, for example," he said. "We're going to see the changes in the amount of snow in the mountains. My guess is in 150 years, Mount Holy Cross will not have its 'cross' because of climate change."

Chapter II of Huber's project says, "The arms of Mount Holy Cross are just a small marker that indicates where our planet may be headed ... We will see in the coming decades if this landscape beacon will survive or become a lost symbol."

And population density, of course, will be another big change 150 years from now, he said.

"Some of the areas will have much more development than they do now, " he said. "Colorado is growing really, really fast. A lot of people. Many of those areas are beautiful — people want to be there."

Huber had plans to publish the project to print, but big panoramas didn't lend themselves to book form and would be quite pricey.

"It certainly was a fun project," said Huber, who also has published various books on Colorado and geology. "I read a lot of books about Colorado, and I only do projects that are fun. So it stayed in that mode of being a fun — sure, hard at times — but really enjoyable (project), and I really got to learn more about the state."

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